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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

[Earth Day] is celebrated in many countries on April 22, which marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Others celebrate this on the March equinox.

IBM has finally aggregated everything that we are doing around "Green" initiatives onto a single[IBM Green] landing page. This has everything from IBM's own activities as well as what we sell to our clients.

Also, to mark this occasion, IBM held an internal contest for employees to make videos about Earth Day,the environment, and IT's role in making the situation better. The grand prize winner, and 10 secondprize winners, are available on this [IBM Green Contest - YouTube channel].Of these, I liked "New Life for Old Silicon" (shown here on the left).

IBM also developed [Power Up, the Game], which is theEarth Day Network's "official" game for today's festivities. It's a 3-D game created by IBM Research to help save a fictitious planet - the goal being to help students learn about ecology and climate change. This game is also hoped to motivate young students to get interested in math, scienceand technology.Eightbar has a great post [PowerUp - A serious game out inthe wild] discussing this.Here's also a 3-minute[the making of "Power Up, the game" video] to geta behind-the-scenes look.The game is a downloadable Windows client that then connects to the main servers to run.

In explaining the word "archive" we came up with two separate Japanese words. One was "katazukeru", and the other was "shimau". If you are clearing the dinner plates from the table after your meal, for example, it could be done for two reasons. Both words mean "to put away", but the motivation that drives this activity changes the word usage. The first reason, katazukeru, is because the table is important, you need the table to be empty or less cluttered to use it for something else, perhaps play some card game, work on arts and craft, or pay your bills. The second reason, shimau, is because the plates are important, perhaps they are your best tableware, used only for holidays or special occasions only, and you don't want to risk having them broken. As it turns out, IBM supports both senses of the word archive. We offer "space management" when the space on the table, (or disk or database), is more important, so older low-access data can be moved off to less expensive disk or tape. We also offer "data retention" where the data itself is valuable, and must be kept on WORM or non-erasable, non-rewriteable storage to meet business or government regulatory compliance.

The process of archiving your data from primary disk to alternate storage media can satisfy both motivations.

IBM offers software specifically to help with this archival process.For email archive, IBM offers [IBM CommonStore] for Lotus Domino and MicrosoftExchange. For database archive, including support for various ERP and CRM applications, IBM offers [IBM Optim] from the acquisition of Princeton Softech.

The problems occur when companies, under the excuse of simplification or consolidation, feel they can just usetheir backups as archives. They are taking daily backups of their email repositories and databases, and keepingthese for seven to ten years. But what happens when their legal e-discovery team needs to find all emails or database records related to a particular situation, an employee, client or account? Good luck! Most backupsare not indexed for this purpose, so storage admins are stuck restoring many different backups to temporary storage and combing through the files in hopes to find the right data.

Backups are intended for operational recovery of data that is lost or corrupted as a result of hardware failures, application defects, or human error. Disk mirroring or remote replication might help with hardware failures, but any logical deletion or corruption of data is immediately duplicated, so it is not a complete solution. FlashCopy or Snapshot point-in-time copies are useful to go back a short time to recover from logical failures, but since they are usually on the same hardware as the original copies, may not protect against hardware failures. And then there's tape, and while many people malign tape as a backup storage choice, 71 percent of customers send backups to tape, according to a 2007 Forrester Research report.

Backups often aren't viable unless restored to the same hardware platform, with the same operating system and application software to make sense of the ones and zeros. For this reason, people typically only keep two to five backup versions, for no more than 30 days, to support operational recovery scenarios. If you make updatesto your hardware, OS or application software, be sure to remember to take fresh new backups, as the old backupsmay no longer apply.

Archives are different. Often, these are copies that have been "hardened" or "fossilized" so that they make sense even if the original hardware, OS or application software is unavailable. They might be indexed so that they can be searched, so that you only have to retrieve exactly the data you are looking for. Finally, they are often stored with "rendering tools" that are able to display the data using your standard web browser, eliminating the need to have a fully working application environment.

Take any backup you might have from five years ago and try to retrieve the information. Can you do it? This might be a real eye-opener. You might have inherited this backup-as-also-archive approach from someone else, and are trying to figure out what to do differently that makes more sense. Call IBM, we can help.

My colleague, Marissa Benekos, is on location with her video camera in Orlando, Florida for theComputerWorld [Storage Networking World] conference.

The IT specialists from the IBM booth were excited at David Bricker's debut on YouTube.Here's the rest of the gang in this [video].

Here's Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM System Storage and keynote speaker at this SNW event, summarizingIBM's "Information Infrastructure" strategy in 60 seconds in this [Youtube video].

This last video is Clod Barrera talking about the importance of security. Clod is an IBM Distinguished Engineerand Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage product line. Here is his[Youtube video]

It looks like Marissa is having a lot of fun taking these videos at the event.More videos, as we get them, will be posted to the [IBM videos channel].